André Dussollier, Niels Arestrup, Burghart Klaußner and Robert Stadlober
Won Best Adapted Screenplay at the César Awards, France 2015
Won Best Screenplay (Golden Goblet) at the Shanghai International Film Festival 2014
Won Best Actor at the Valladolid International Film Festival 2014
In the summer of 1944, Hitler gives orders that the French capital should not fall into enemy hands, or if it does, then ‘only as a field of rubble’. The person assigned to carry out this barbaric act is Wehrmacht commander of Greater Paris, General Dietrich von Choltitz, who already has mines planted on the Eiffel Tower, in the Louvre and Notre Dame and on the bridges over the Seine. Nothing should be left as a reminder of the city’s former glory. However, at dawn on 25 August, Swedish Consul General Raoul Nordling steals into German headquarters through a secret underground tunnel and tries to persuade Choltitz to abandon his plan.
In the presence of the director Volker Schlöndorff